I also. Only read. A third. Of this miserably written. Article. Because. The style. Irritated the shit out of me.
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Read it in Captain Kirkās voice! (Thatās what I did with your post ^_^)
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If weāre not reading, then who are these people with books on the bus?
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Agree, this article was a clear cry for help from the author
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It really reads like one of many modern complaints that people simply donāt know how to stop giving a shit about the digital world and frame it as if itās common or a scientific problem.
āIt turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to train us to pay attention to themā - tuned by whom? This gives it an agency that doesnāt exist. fMRIs showing āpleasure centresā lighting up with activity doesnāt mean anything - it distributes both dopamine and serotonin and thereās no way to tell from fMRI what itās actually doing.
I donāt watch television. I donāt have twitter. I use facebook only for coordinating events and I live in a studio so if my computer wasnāt in my bedroom it would be outside in the hallway. I still donāt read a lot of books, and the reason isnāt because Iām hopelessly addicted to distraction by shiny toys but because I donāt have a forty minute commute on the bus/train anymore and itās really hard to hold and read a book while Iām cooking or cleaning or practising my craft.
Itās not about machines calibrated to dope us into stupefaction for ~reasons~. Itās about priorities not necessarily allowing for sitting in one place for 20-60 minutes concentrating on a book. If facebook and email and twitter are stopping you doing that then the issue isnāt facebook and email and twitter or sinister biomechanical processes they cause. Itās your priorities.
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Amen! Record numbers of people are getting rid of their televisions, and a lot of them are also turning their backs on social media.
If thereās a boing boing comment thread that Randall Munroe doesnāt have a relevant comic for, Iāve yet to come across it:
(edited for typo)
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I find that I read even more than I did before because no matter where I am, I always have kindle available on my phone.
I find myself reading more than I used to, but unsurprisingly, in shorter chunks. Yup, not as many books. And, am I really the first person here to point out that Holy Guy in the painting has two left hands?
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Breaking News: New medium for reading gains following, some people substitute some of their reading time to new medium. Film at 11!
Geez. For the first time since the widespread adoption of radio, the literate west is spending more time engaged with text than with audio or audio-visual media, and this author is complaining that weāre spending it on shorter forms. Well, somebody whoās been engaging mostly with book-length documents might find it shocking to transfer over to article-length documents, but someone whose reading material was previously limited to the newspaper will not (and instead find it interesting that ā gee! ā theyāre reading thirty or forty times what they used to read, at an average higher quality of content because of how easy fact checking has gotten in the past thirty years).
(I do read fewer books now that Iām reading all day at work. When I want to read a book, I turn off my monitor for the day and read; itās very effective. That said, I donāt use social media while at work, I donāt use it on my phone, and I keep phone notifications off ā so most of the dopamine triggers donāt affect me. Doing that doesnāt take any particular effort or self-control ā just change the settings.)
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I donāt think this is about text vs. voice, but about focus vs. lack of focus.
I have been having more trouble focusing, though I donāt know if it is personal or is more widespread.
Iām not really convinced.
I read 900+ page books on-screen way more often than I do on the printed page. Iām not convinced that Iām the only one.
There are definitely media outlets that specialize in shorter, shallower content. Some of them are doing quite well. There are other media outlets that specialize in longer, more in-depth content; some of those are doing quite well. A couple organizations are doing a really good job with both forms simultaneously (Buzzfeed, Cracked, Vice ā all purveyors of remarkably good journalism these days). Iām sure that some people are transitioning to shorter-form media who are used to longer-form media; that said, the short-form boom peaked several years ago and weāre starting to see a lot more emphasis on long-form, which probably indicates that more people are focusing on longer-form content lately.
One very clear change in terms of journalism & media lately is formalism ā and I think this is more widespread and more interesting than the length issue. The best written journalism these days is coming out of organizations that are essentially joke sites (Buzzfeed only fairly recently started pumping out the good journalism, but Cracked has been the home of dick-jokes-with-footnotes ever since OāBrien took over), mirroring the general trends in television journalism (you know, with the best journalism and fact-checking coming out of Daily Show alumni).
The internet changes how media is consumed. But, it changes how media is consumed in very complex ways. Widespread access to high-quality streaming video has simultaneously created a market for extremely short media (youtube shows that average out at 9 minutes; 15 second films) that couldnāt fit into the schedule of a TV channel or a feature film and also long-running, densely-packed serial shows (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards) that are best consumed in marathon viewing ā it turns out that there was a big market for video that doesnāt correspond to existing notions about ideal length, in the same way that LPs made it possible for prog rockers to make the longer-than-three-minute songs they always wanted. Long before that, the internet made it feasible to distribute extremely long documents with a limited audience ā books that would never be printed because the paper would be too expensive, but that now can be distributed for free to anybody who wants to read a six thousand page fanfiction about what would happen if Captain Kirk was a genderbent space hippo; then, ten years later, we got the world wide web, and that encouraged the distribution of extremely short snippets of text densely linked to other extremely short snippets of text in such a way that context can become a part of the content.
I really donāt think that a lack of sustained focus is a modern or recent thing. (To be fair, though ā shut off notifications, because notifications can and will cause you to lose focus.) The difference is that it used to take a lot of focus to complain about your lack of focus in a way that reached ten thousand people. Now, all you need to do is write about it and post it somewhere and you have a non-zero likelihood of reaching that scale of audience. (In other words, ADHD is no longer invisible, but some people misinterpret greater visibility for greater prevalence.)
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āHigh Qualityā is a damn lie.
Speak for yourself while I start my third book this week tomorrow.
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